 think that's always been sort of a challenge for the Army of wanting to leverage technology but then also being such a the most people-centric of all of the services seeing that there might be some institutional threat to becoming overly reliant on that and and also just an expectation that if you are going to be as you have talked about before delivering that effect in and amongst the people as a core competency making sure that you don't over rely on technology so how do you think about finding that right balance and and especially when there are pressures pushing you financial pressures pushing you in one direction yeah so I think one area that we need to be thinking about is how we lean the force out so we're always our our force is defined first by our responsibilities and so we have responsibilities internationally and we have responsibilities at home and those are unique and frankly people-centric in many respects to you know aiding our citizens at home that's not something you do from afar you have to do that up close and personal and quite frankly as populations grow and these trends and urbanization continue the importance of very switched on highly capable adaptive agile leaders is going to be more important not less so that's our first point is we're going to continue to focus on our people but having said that as I mentioned before we're our personnel accounts going to go down and but even as it does we're still going to spend about you know a little bit less than half of our budget on people so as we get smaller we have to get more out of those people and so the first part of answering your question is how do we optimize our people and so giving them very dynamic training environments that confront them with a variety of different challenges so that they maintain an intellectual and operational agility and not get kind of used to doing one thing is very important to that keeping them involved in the international environment as we have done with regional forces in Africa as we continue to do with the forces that are of course station in Europe and station in the Pacific and with the forces that we rotate down into Latin America as an example those are all ways to keep our soldiers and our leaders engaged in the world and and aware of what's going on and frankly a culture rated not necessarily culturally expert or linguistically expert but understand how to operate and interact with other cultures and people so that we can build partners build their capacity and you know when necessary operate with them more effectively but at the same time as we look farther into the future we have to think about leveraging some of the emerging opportunities you know brain science is is is an emerging area in understanding how to leverage that science to improve the performance of our people is I think going to be a key area of investment going forward you know interestingly the brains of brainwaves of a master versus someone who's an amateur the brainwave of Tiger Woods when he's driving off of a tee is very low and whereas the amateurs brain is firing all over the place because he has not mastered the skill what that means is that Tiger Woods is able to devote all of his cognitive energy to solving a problem looking at the wind making sure the ball goes where he wants to etc while the amateurs just worry about getting the ball off the tee and so if we can leverage it that emerging understanding and help our younger leaders in particular master tasks more effectively so that they become intuitive they'll be more capable of devoting all their energy to solving problems and be more effective and they'll have greater judgment and therefore be able to do more at the lowest possible level so getting the people better is a key part of that we are again is I think you know committed to digitizing the army I think we've made some great strides in that area and getting the army into it you know the information space where you're not worried about or concerned about where your buddies are because you you can see that you know inherently where they're at where you're getting more information that's actionable at the lowest possible levels will empower those leaders that are enabled and then if we are able to couple those two things with you know some of the virtual reality capabilities that are coming forward or augmented reality in operations they're going to perform at a much higher level because they will have seen and experienced a lot of this stuff virtually and that will raise their performance in ways that I think we don't quite understand yet and that will allow them to make decisions at very low levels and to employ capabilities at very low levels that we currently reserve at echelons you know far above them I mean when I my last assignment in Afghanistan I was often called in to approved targeting for people at several echelons below me well that's because they didn't have the experience and judgment at least the army felt that way and so Brigadier General Hicks had to make that call not a captain major or indeed in many cases a colonel and so that's I think a key area of getting more out of the people we have another part is to make sure we understand what is operationally what is the operational side of the army look like you know we have this current kind of taxonomy of tooth and tail we have to rethink that clearly our cyber warriors are not tail they have an effect either on the environment we operate in or on the people that we're operating with or against and we need to count them as part of the tooth so that tooth tail ratio may be a thing of the past but what we do need to do is understand what parts of the army have that effect on the environment or on the people that were aimed at influencing either to help them or in some cases to compel them to do our will and then what part of the army is there to and actually has an effect on that operational force in other words enables them to operate and in focus on how do we achieve the right balance and then reduce the number of people in that support structure so that the investment of a smaller army in terms of manpower actually gives you the same or more capability going forward and there are some you know promising areas there in terms of fuel efficiency greater reliability of platforms which therefore demand less support there's also the potential in some cases that we can augment forces and so I was talking with one of your colleagues beforehand and I don't think this is right around the corner some people will represent it that way but unmanned and man teaming on the ground where units have greater effect is something where we think the potential maybe in 10 or 15 years to really begin to see a shift in capability and make fighting formations more lethal and agile without adding additional manpower will be important we've already begun doing that in the air we have actually we've done it in Afghanistan in live operations but the air domain is a far less complex environment than land and right now the robots on land require a great deal of supervision if you want to get something out of them they tend to turn over or drive the wrong way or any number of other things if you don't keep an eye on them today now you know if some of the learning systems and artificial intelligence actually delivers there may be an opportunity to have them operate you know kind of in relationship that you see with a hunter and a bird dog where they're you know the bird dog augments the hunter and there there's a learned behavior between the two that's something if we're able to do that be very powerful on the other end looking at the support structures there are a number of more near-term things that I think will allow us to begin reducing that end of the force without impacting capability one promising area and I'll say this we have a robotic truck capability that you can apply to almost any truck in our inventory that performs at a higher level than the Google car that everybody sees on TV and we've demonstrated that here recently several different times and I think that's an area of great potential now you may not be able to use that far forward where you know you need people to be thinking about the enemy but in the you know farther away from where contact may be if you don't have to have ten trucks with 20 soldiers you know two per truck driving them that's a that's a great opportunity so it's things like that I think will probably over the next five to ten years you'll start seeing some improvement there so being able to rebalance that relationship between the operational force and the support force will allow us to be smarter about getting more out of a smaller manpower pool